For most people in occupational ministry, weekends are not days of rest. For me, I'm not sure when my "day" of rest is, but I can assure you that I do get a compilation of 24 hours to kick back every week. Often, Sundays are quite peaceful until the evenings, but for this reason they are also often chosen for events at church. This Sunday was the "Happy Day" at my church. Yes, happy day, in English, and I have no idea why. Last Friday, the 12th, was Children's Day in Brazil and the church was originally going to celebrate by throwing a party for the local kids last weekend, but this Sunday was a better day. So, because they lacked other parties to go to due to the fact that the actual holiday was a week and 1/2 ago, over 200 local kids came to my church yesterday afternoon, and it was craaaazy.
I found myself remembering the mind of a child. Remembering myself when cotton candy was the coolest thing ever and my parents never let me have any. Remembering when the ball pit at McDonald's was unbelievable fun (though alwasy slightly painful, and let's be honest...smelly.) Puppets are always hysterical (and yesterday I was laughing out loud at one as well, so some things never change. Man that little Pati was a trip) and ideally, face paint should be permanent and cover as much skin as possible. With these things in mind, yesterday was so cool for those kids. The church really went all-out, in a way that in the US would have been banned, due to waivers the parents would have had to sign to let their kids on a very rickety trampoline and a slightly deflating climbing wall. They had 2 trampolines, one inside just for little kids, and one outside. They had cotton candy, tons of ice cream, popcorn, hot dogs, all for free. What?? That's an AWESOME party. The kids were just running wild basically, covered in chocolate cake and wet from the rain that kept coming and going. It was totally crazy, but so cool.
Needless to say, however, spending one day decorating for that, and then another 8 hours the next day monitoring small children as they tried to jump off a small slide (I actually caught one girl mid-flight...sheesh) the weekend felt like it was sucked up into a vortex of "Happy Day" and I'm sad to report that I will never be able to listen to that song again.
I'm trying to make the most of my last week and 1/2 of Portuguese lessons...and my Portuguese is really just laughable. I can talk, but I make a fool of myself every .02 seconds. Last night someone asked me, "you don't have gates in the houses in the US, right?" and I said no...then I went on to say that we had wooden doors too...but instead I said that we had doors made out of butter. BUTTER DOORS. Can you imagine?? I was wondering why the girls looked confused. Finally I found some wood and demonstrated, and one calmly said, "wood?" Yes. Wood. Yeesh.
Humbling.
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Oh man, I LOVE puppets. Seriously, a good muppet skit still gets me laughing these days. You are SUCH a journalist. I was sucked into reminiscing about my childhood just by reading that. Unfortunately I was terribly allerigic to facepaint, you know how sensitive my skin can be. Sometimes my parents let me do it anyway, but I'd have a rash for the next 24 hours in the shape of whatever I'd had painted. Unfortunate. *irritated* ha. Hey, you can't be THAT bad at the Portch. At least you can talk about doors - I mean, really. You shoulda covered for yourself and gone on about a tradition we have in the US that involves buttering our doors on the 11th of June at 5:03am in order to keep the werewolves at bay. You must know how to say werewolves in the Portch. It's very practical. Um, this is the LONGEST and dumbest comment ever.
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